A giant panda sits in the grass, working happily through an armful of bamboo 🐼 The dark patches around the eyes are the giveaway. Colour the panda in black and white, then bring the bamboo up in fresh green — the leaves are the one place in this picture where a lighter green beside a darker one really shows.
The giant panda still belongs to the order Carnivora — the same group as bears, dogs and cats — and its gut is built like a meat-eater’s, short and simple. Over a long stretch of evolution it shifted to bamboo, which grows all year round in the mountain forests of central China where pandas live. Bamboo is poor food, so a panda has to keep eating: figures in the range of roughly 12 to 38 kg a day are reported, depending on whether it is getting through leaves, tough stems or the heavier spring shoots.
Why is a panda black and white?
Several explanations have been offered, and one study is worth knowing. In 2017 Tim Caro and colleagues compared the panda’s markings against those of many other mammals and concluded the pattern is probably doing two different jobs at once: the white body helps it disappear against snow and the dark shoulders and legs against shade, while the black eye patches and ears are more likely used for communication — telling one another apart, and looking fierce to a rival. The “sunscreen” explanation that circulates online has no evidence behind it.
